In early December I came to a stop in a dark pre-Christmas wood. Which fork should I take? The path that leads to Scrooge and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas? Or the path that leads to Harassed Christmas List-making and Gift-shopping! ​I chose The Way of the Grinch Who Stole Christmas, because Christmas is a snow job … and even the snow is fake.

Census results show that fewer New Zealanders identify as Christian than ever before, and more of us admit to having no religious belief at all. Growing numbers of us are Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish or Muslim. Rugby and the America’s Cup probably inspire more zealotry in New Zealand than any God. Which means that not many of us believe that a supernatural birth occurred in Bethlehem on the 25th of December 2017 years ago. ​

​Santa is the real God of modern Christmas. Images of the baby Jesus in a stable are displayed in shop windows almost interchangeably with images of Santa wreathed in holly and unreasonable, unseasonable snow. I imagine that some kids these days are so confused that they think it’s baby Santa they see napping in the hay. They may well think that the baby, grown paunchy and whiskery with age, has simply moved to cooler climes and swapped his swaddling clothes for red, fur-trimmed long-johns.

It was the curious incident of the dog (almost) exploding in the night time which suggested to me a revolutionary way to improve science teaching in New Zealand. I have high hopes that our new Labour-lead government will be eager to trial the idea I am about to propose.

First, some background.I did poorly in maths and science at school although my failure can't be attributed entirely to the education system: I spent a lot of class time digging holes into lab benches with the spiked end of a compass, or melting ballpoint pens over a Bunsen burner.

It might even be possible that my brain function was reduced by mercury poisoning. The dental nurse at my primary school rewarded us for not screaming blue murder during her ministrations by giving us a drop of mercury in a little plastic box. Returning to class with stretched lips and a mouth full of amalgam, you'd would immediately tip out the mercury for the fun of watching it roll about your desktop.

It was by observing the melting, silvery, slither of the mercury that I learned what “mercurial” actually meant.

​I believe that if such connections between real life and taught fact had been forged more frequently in science classes of my youth, ​​I might now be in charge of the Hadron Collider or the recipient of a Nobel Prize for mathematics.

Which brings me back to the incident of the (almost) exploding dog which occurred last week ...

Mr Trump is very fond of "alternative facts" and we ridicule and castigate him for it.

​But I've been wondering if his self-flattering fibs are so different from the air-brushed versions of our lives which we present on Facebook.

On Facebook we all lead perfect lives. On Facebook everyone’s life is packed with caring friends, doting parents, handsome lovers, adorable children and perfect pets. Everyone is talented and clever, and has a fascinating job. On Facebook everyone recycles, saves whales and rain forests, eats mountains of kale at the coolest restaurants, and goes on cycling tours of Outer Mongolia at the drop of a hat.

No one on Facebook is lonely, unemployed, in debt, or suffers from acne, low self-esteem or depression. Let's start telling the truth on Facebook ... I’ll go first:

We’ve all seen enough portly old gents and with arthritic, rheumy-eyed spaniels, or whip-thin joggers with greyhounds to suggest there’s some truth to the cliché that dogs look like their owners. Or that owners look like their dogs.

​When in my fifties, I got my first dog - an unusually-coloured grey and white Fox Terrier - I feared that I had become a doggy cliché myself: the dog and I both had grey hair and rather long noses.

Ironically, I had hoped that owning a Fox Terrier might help me avoid becoming another kind of cliché – a woman of a certain age with a small, white, curly-haired dog with a composite-breed name like LackaNoodle or YuckyPoo. What I really wanted was a dog whose temperament would complement mine. I went so far as to complete a questionnaire which purported to assist in the matching process.

Some of the questions – allergies, activity levels, sociability – were predictable enough. Other questions were rather more left-field: What kind of amusement park ride best describes the energy in your home? (Carousel/Ferris Wheel/Log Ride/Roller Coaster); How do you react on the road when another driver cuts you off? (Slow down to give him some space/Lean on the horn/Accelerate and try to cut him off); Does drooling bother you much? (Not a bit/Not my favourite thing/I really don't like it)​The results suggested that I’d be happiest with a Fox Terrier, a breed known for being “intelligent, outgoing, active, inquisitive and quite stylish (when groomed properly)” That sounded like me. And so it came to pass that I lived very happily with my Fox Terrier, Pete, until liver cancer and the ministrations of a compassionate vet delivered him to the Great Bone Yard in the Sky.

My previous posting was all about the miraculous hearing aids which I trialled a while back.

In that posting, I didn't mention that I returned the aids after my ten day trial because I couldn't afford them.

That's the bad news. ​

Here's the good news.

I found a way to buy a superior pair of hearing at an affordable price. I told that story in my Grey Urbanist column in the Nelson Mail this week. For copyright reasons I can't yet publish the column on my blog. However, you can read it here.

​I’ve been walking around this week with two and a half thousand dollars tucked behind each ear and no one’s noticed except me. Which is something of a relief: I’ve been trialling a pair of hearing aids. Their invisibility has made it easier for the vain and foolish part of to accept that I am wearing these twin badges of age and disability. ​Naturally, I’d much rather be wearing diamonds as big as the Ritz in my ears. Or if I must wear expensive hi-tech gadgetry, I’d prefer that it was something way cooler and more youthful - the latest Apple Watch perhaps - than a hearing aid. Self-conscious idiocy aside, the effect of wearing hearing aids has been more positive, and more radical than I could have imagined.

Leonard Cohen, the Canadian poet and songwriter, died in Los Angeles on the 7th of November. ​On the following day, Donald Trump was elected President of the Dis-United States. ​

“Everybody knows that the boat is leaking / Everybody knows that the captain lied / Everybody got this broken feeling / Like their father or their dog just died …”

​Cohen wrote about hate as well as love, war as well as peace, of the profane as well as the sacred, the agony as well as the ecstasy of life. For this he was often mocked as a gloom merchant: a depressive who wrote songs to slash your wrists by. But after months of relentlessly cruel and ugly politicking in the U.S. presidential campaign, and the election of an ignorant, racist, intellectual pygmy to the presidency, we need a songwriter like Cohen even more. There is some strange solace to be found in the way Cohen wrestles so lyrically in his songs with the best and the worst of human nature.

THE GREY URBANISTRo Cambridge, is a freelance writer, radio show host, arts worker & columnist reports on the oddities & serendipities of urban life. She roams Nelson city with a tan & white Jack Russell. Pete, her original canine side-kick features in many of these pieces, but died in April 2015.